Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley 1818

First published in The Examiner of the 11th of January 1818, with the signature “Glirastes.” There is no verbal variation between that version and the reprint in the Rosalind and Helen volume. In Middleton’s Shelley and His Writings (Vol. II, p. 71) we are told that Shelley, Keats, and Leigh Hunt “tried to excel each other in writing a sonnet on the Nile;” and he adds that Shelley’s Ozymandias “was one of these.” He gives no authority for this latter statement; and I presume it rests upon the fact that Lord Houghton, in his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats, appends the Ozymandias Sonnet, with those of Keats and Hunt, to the letter in which Keats recounts the friendly strife. Lord Houghton (Vol. 1, p. 99) merely introduces the three Sonnets with the words, “These are the three sonnets on the Nile here alluded to; and very characteristic they are.” At all events it is to be remarked that this is not a sonnet on the Nile, and that, among the Leigh Hunt MSS. placed at my disposal by Mr. Townshend Mayer, there is a sonnet in Shelley's handwriting addressed “To the Nile,”—which will be found in Vol. III of this edition of his works.

I MET a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart.
Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:* 
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains.
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.


*I should not have supposed lines 7 and 8 to present a difficulty ; but asaman of letters of my acquaintance tells me he considers them unintelligible, it may be well to note that the clause stamped on these lifeless things is parenthetic, the meaning being that the passions of Ozymandias, being stamped on the lifeless fragments of his statue, still survive the sculptor’s hand which mocked them, and the tyrant’s heart which fed them.